I’ve been on Mastodon a little over a week now. There are still communities on the internet that share cool things with each other that are not on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Tiktok. Among other things, I’ve rediscovered Cory Doctorow’s writing. And I’m enthralled by Jamie Zawinski’s writing, aka JWZ.
And Cory Doctorow got me thinking, I wonder what’s on BoingBoing these days? I used to love that site, so I go on there… and the site’s content hasn’t changed much. And then I remembered why I stopped visiting that site. There’s still links to interesting stuff, but unless I’m using an ad blocker, the experience is just awful. Tacky video ads pop up while I’m trying to read something. BoingBoing was created by and is run currently by people who know better. I shouldn’t have to use an ad blocker on BoingBoing, like, it’s a site I would gladly be subjected the occasional text/stationary graphic ad on so they can do what they do. But the ads there like so many other places on the internet made the experience awful, so, I navigated away. There’s a lot of things that are just incorrect on the internet and I’ve accepted that. It bums me out more that BoingBoing is one of them.
I’ve developed a rule for myself that unless it’s absolutely necessary, if I have to use an ad blocker on your site I’m just not going to bother. If I can afford my hosting fees so as not to make the experience on this site awful, so can they.. And I understand I don’t have the profit motivation here, nothing wrong with that, things cost money. This isn’t Star Trek…
But how low does the bar have to be? Some stupid video popping up or some moving graphic while I’m trying to read something? It’s just terrible.
So as I was saying, I’ve been on Mastodon a little over a week now and I’m really enjoying it. I like that by design -relative to other social media- it does not encourage people to behave like robots. There is nothing on Mastodon stopping you from quoting someone and writing your own commentary about it. It just isn’t some automated feature. I like that if you’re going to do that you have to spend an extra 15 seconds or so to think about it. I even like that it takes another step or two to follow people on there. It discourages robot-think. If Mastodon introduced a feature automating that, would it be the end of the world? No. But, I fear that a lot of people that would otherwise not, will behave like robots.
That’s all for now.
-Ira
